"But we know how to beat it now." The officer from Langley thought he saw it.

The controller wasn't so sure. "We'll know that in another few hours."

Sandy Richter was even lower than the C-17 had dared to go. He was also slower, at a mere one hundred fifty knots, and already tired from the curious mixture of tension and boredom on the overwater flight. The previous night he and the other two aircraft in his flight had staged to Petrovka West, yet another mothballed MiG base near Vladivostok. There they'd gotten what would surely be their last decent sleep for the next few days, and lifted off at 2200 hours to begin their part in Operation ZORRO. Each aircraft now had wing sponsons attached, and on each were two extra fuel tanks, and while they were needed for the range of this flight, they were decidedly unsteathy even though the tanks themselves had been made out of radar-transparent fiberglass in an effort to improve things a little bit. The pilot was wearing his normal flight gear plus an inflatable life jacket. It was a concession to regulations about flying over water rather than as anything really useful. The water fifty feet below was too cold for long survival. He put the thought aside as best he could, settled into his seat, and concentrated on the flying while the gunner in back handled the instruments.

"Still okay, Sandy." The threat screen was still more black than anything else as they turned east toward Honshu.

"Rog." Behind them at ten-mile intervals, two more Comanches were heading in.

Though small and a mere helicopter, the RAH-66A was in some ways the most sophislticated aircraft in the world. It carried in its composite airframe the two most powerful computers ever taken aloft, and one of them was merely a backup in case the first should break. Their principal task for the moment was to plot the radar coverage that they had to penetrate to compute the relative radar cross-section of their airframe against the known or estimated capabilities of the electronic eyes now sweeping the area. The closer they got to the Japanese mainland, the larger grew the yellow areas of maybe-detect and the red areas of definite-detect.

"Phase Two," the man from Air Combat Command said quietly aboard the AWACS.

The F-22 fighters all carried jamming gear, the better to accentuate their stealth capabilities, and on command these were switched on.